Wednesday, October 10, 2012

“MOOC Hype” continues…

Perhaps it may be soon to claim that the current trends in open online learning; MOOC movement will revolutionize higher education but, there is no doubt that it is here to go. However, the history of MOOC dates back to 2007 and 2008 with the works of some Canadian educators such as Downes, Siemens, Couros, Cormier and Wiley in US by offering open online courses (open education, PLENK, CCK, EC&I which I have explained in previous posts) but there have been a lot of conversations around the topic and the implications for online education since its boom in 2011.
 Nowadays, the word of MOOC has spread more and there are many initiatives in cooperation with prestigious universities and higher education institutions in different forms to offer open online courses for instance: Stanford online courses, MITx, edX, Google MOOC, Udacity, Coursera etc.  
Although, yet there is no common definition and understanding of MOOC and the way it is practiced. For example some people make distinction between connectivist MOOCs (c-MOOCs: e.g. PLENK, CCK) and other types of MOOCs (x-MOOCs e.g. Coursera, edX) in how they are run and financed. See this post by George Siemens for more explanations.  Whatever the forms and approaches to MOOC are, the big question is that how they will transform current practices and traditions of universities and what they can really offer? Is it a promising transformation in education or just hype?

Here are some resources related to MOOCs and online courses:
-           A list of open online courses and related resources which I am curating in Scoop.it.
-           Stephen Downes and George Siemens pioneers in MOOC have created mooc.ca  as a portal to center their activities about MOOC. Here Downes also has put some resources to find open online courses.

Below is also rather a long list of different resources (magazine articles, blog-posts etc.) tackling issues of MOOC that I have come across over time on the web:

-          5 Potential Ways MOOCs Will Evolve 
-          Webinar What is a MOOC JISC
-          MOOCs EDUCAUSE 
-          Loveless MOOCs 
-          'oldsmooc' Scoop.it 
-          The Language of MOOCs
-          What are MOOCs all about
-          The Rise of MOOCs ~ Stephen's Web